Soon the government came to our aid by issuing in March, 1862, “postage currency.” Five, ten, twenty-five and fifty cent notes abounded. Postage stamps as currency then disappeared from the marts of retail trade, and no longer pestered street-car passengers and conductors. These tiny notes of green paper were now doing the usual work of the silver coins that had gone into hiding. And a year later, in March, 1863, the government, still seeking to help the people in that time when metallic currency was no longer in evidence, issued paper “fractional currency.” For greater convenience notes of three and fifteen cents were issued in addition to those of the “postage currency.”

These small notes were generally called shinplasters. How fine they looked as they came crisp and clean from Washington; but in a dusty, smoky city like ours, constantly passing from hand to hand, they soon became worn, tattered, almost illegible, and unspeakably nasty. But few seemed to care for this. These begrimed notes met our necessities in barter; and as to any inconvenience or repulsiveness that was accounted for and cheerfully endured as a part of the war.

The government, in order to raise money to meet its necessities, issued seven per cent. bonds of fifty and one hundred dollars. I invested five hundred dollars in these securities, and to my astonishment was reported in the papers and personally congratulated on the street as having done a patriotic act. I had not looked upon it in that light. But the incident shows that very many in St. Louis then thought the stability of our Republic so precarious that investing money in her bonds at seven per cent. was regarded as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice. That is a sort of self-sacrifice that hosts of men would be glad to indulge in now.

CHAPTER XIX
NOT PEACE BUT THE SWORD

On the 19th of May, 1862, Edward Everett came to us and delivered his famous oration on Washington. Very few in our city had ever before seen him. A large audience of the most intelligent and cultured among us gathered to hear him. The style of his great speech was clear and finished; his elocution, while a little stately, was nearly faultless; his voice was agreeable and reaching; his gestures graceful and fitting, but he lacked magnetism. His whole effort seemed somewhat studied and a bit mechanical. When pronouncing a given phrase he stretched out his arm and from the palm of his hand extended one finger; when uttering another, he extended two fingers; when enunciating another, three fingers; and now and then in making a full-arm gesture he opened the whole hand. One could not help thinking that before appearing in public he had carefully drilled himself before a looking-glass.

His audience listened intently, but was not much moved. He appealed to the head far more strongly than to the heart. Still to sit at the feet of so distinguished an orator was to us all a rare treat.

He was not only gathering funds to complete the Washington monument at the national capital, but was still endeavoring, through the love borne to Washington by the people both of the North and South, to unite a divided and warring nation. Amid the clash of arms he was eloquently pleading for peace. His purpose was noble, but his effort was futile. The ears of contending hosts, seething with the passions of war, were deaf to all appeals for peace. One might as well have undertaken to put out the fires of a conflagration by a speech, as to stay the bloody national conflict then raging by an oration on Washington.

Fiercer war soon followed this eloquent pleading for good will and harmony. When, in April, General Halleck departed for Corinth, Mississippi, he left General Schofield in command of the greater part of our State, and on the 1st of June he put him in temporary command of the entire Department of Missouri. General Schofield now sent all the soldiers that could possibly be spared from St. Louis and Missouri to swell the ranks of the army in Mississippi. The ever watchful enemy learned from spies among us that we were largely denuded of national troops, and determined to put forth one more vigorous effort to secure the secession of Missouri.

Their hostile campaign had been manifestly skilfully planned. Their open and aggressive movement began in the latter part of June. All at once guerrillas swarmed in every part of the State. It is estimated that there were full ten thousand of them.[[89]] They were first in northeast, then in central and western, Missouri; now here, now there, they looted and burned the houses of Union men; plundered farms and villages; tore up railroad tracks; destroyed bridges; attacked different detachments of militia; were by turns victorious and defeated; but on August 13th, having massed their forces, they won a signal victory over the Union troops at Independence, and two days later ambushed eight hundred of them in Jackson County. No one now cares for the rebel Colonels Porter, Quantrell, Cobb, Poindexter, Coffee, McBride and Hughes; but they were then the chief figures in these scenes of desolation. But when they were at the height of their success, the scale turned. General Blunt from Kansas appeared with a small but well-appointed army and drove them with their ill-gotten plunder into Arkansas.

But as flies when brushed away at once return again, so they appeared again in September, in northeast Missouri, and so effective were their movements that for the time being they took possession of that part of the State, except posts adequately garrisoned by United States troops.